Oh, God. She grabbed her throat, rubbing it between the vee of her thumb and fingers. That was her screaming. The mattress groaned and sagged with Holly’s weight and Sarah bent forward, her sister’s hand on her back.
Was someone else here? No. No, that had been in the dream. A young woman in a long white nightgown, her back to Sarah. Hurrying down the grand staircase, the thin white fabric fluttering behind her. Sarah squeezed her eyelids shut. The woman reached the main floor, her hand on the newel post, and glanced back, up the stairs. Sarah stared into the memory, the waves of terror flooding over her. Then the woman angled toward the French doors that opened onto the deck. That’s when she’d heard the scream. Her own scream.
“Abby,” she said, gasping. “Where’s Abby? Where’s Noah?”
“The kids are fine,” Holly said. “It was just a dream.”
Sarah ran her hands over her face, pressing the heels into her eyes, then rubbing them with her fingers. The images were gone; the screaming had stopped.
But the terror still lapped at her skin like the waves lapped the cobbled lakeshore.
She’d said there was nothing left to fear, with Lucas dead. Was she wrong? Was the fear just in her mind?
“You’re freezing,” Holly said, draping the thick cotton quilt around Sarah’s shoulders.
“No,” she said. “No. I have to see where she went.” She pulled away, swinging her feet off the high mattress and onto the braided rug.
“Who?” Holly called after her. “Sarah, stop. There is no one.”
In the hallway, Sarah gripped the rail with both hands, then rocked back and collapsed onto her heels.
“She was right here. I saw her. I saw her go down the stairs and out the door. I heard her scream.”
Holly crouched beside her. “There’s no one here but us.”
“I—heard—her. I saw her.”
“Who? Who did you see?”
Sarah raised her eyes to her sister’s, so like her own. So like her daughter’s.
“No one,” she said. “It was no one. You were right. Nothing but a bad dream.”
She couldn’t tell her sister the truth. She had only caught a glimpse of the woman in the nightgown, the woman running toward the doors and out to the lake.
But while she didn’t know the face, she recognized the terror.
THURSDAY
Twenty Days
17
This time when Sarah woke, it was to the sound of rain.
But why was she in Holly’s bed? An arm’s length away, in Sarah’s bed, Holly was fast asleep, cocooned in the Flying Geese quilt, the cat tucked behind her bent knees. Sarah pushed herself up, leaned against the pillows, and began to tease the middle-of-the-night events out of the cobwebs in her mind.
The face. The screaming girl.
Her fingers plucked at her chest. The thick cotton of her sweatshirt, not the wispy white nightgown she half-expected to be wearing.
The three-legged clock on the nightstand said six fifteen.
The dream—the nightmare—had been so vivid. As though she herself had been that terrified, panic-stricken girl.
Her therapist said that people in dreams are often mirrors of ourselves, chosen by the subconscious mind to force us to focus on some aspect, some trait that the dream figure represents.
No question what that girl represented.